G'day all,
Here is a direct submission by Dr Hansen. I'll leave it for anyone to decide just how unbiased Dr Hansen is. The use of "dangerous" is clearly Dr Hansen's from the very beginning and his emphasis. This is a public document by the way so I'm not reproducing anything that Dr Hansen did not wish to be generally distributed.
Several people have asked about the status of ?Dangerous human-made interference with climate: a GISS modelE study?, submitted to JGR in December 2005, which includes figures used in my ?Keeling? presentation at AGU earlier that month.
Given the reaction of the editor and some referees (attached) it seems the jig is up for publication in JGR of detail comparable to that in our ?Efficacy? paper (JGR, 110, D18104, 2005), which had 28 figures and 45 pages. I indicated in my submittal letter with the ?Dangerous? paper that we could break it into two parts: simulations of past climate (which test the model) and climate projections (which investigate ?dangerous? change), but clearly that would not satisfy the new publication criterion that readers must ?be able to read a paper in one sitting without stopping? (EOS Trans. Amer. Geophys. Union, 87, 140, 4 April 2006).
I also disagree with the editor?s philosophy about figures, which I think are worth a thousand words. Given simulations for 10 individual forcings, it is valuable to show the response to each side by side, along with observations and the standard deviation of ensemble members. The intelligent reader does not need to have each map explained in detail. And throwing out the maps showing lesser response would do more harm than good, making the presentation more difficult to follow and less instructive.
I suspect that the difficulty in getting progress toward publication of this paper relates not only to its length but to an unstated sociological matter. I sense an aversion to papers with blunt statements about the practical significance of results (though I would not claim that this example demonstrates it, or even that the statistics on all the papers I have ever submitted could prove it). If societal implications do not belong in a geophysical journal, who is going to say them for us? What is wrong with connecting dots, and why should we have to write a separate paper for a different journal, satisfying some entirely different editorial criteria ? meaning, in practice, that the implication paper never gets written? In papers a century ago, which are a delight to read, the authors did not seem afraid to discuss implications. Why impose self censorship and leave important conclusions opaque to others?
In any case, I have divided the paper into two parts: ?Dangerous human-made interference with climate: a GISS modelE study? and ?Climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS model E?. Both papers are available at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~www/. The small version of each paper has figure resolution/quality reduced, while the large version has figure quality approaching what it would be in journal publication.
We will submit the ?Dangerous? paper for publication soon. We may have to publish the other paper as a report, as I can?t think of a journal that is likely to accept a paper that long.
The content of these papers is the same as before division into two, except that we have added two figures to ?Dangerous?, Figures 9 and 10, which you may find interesting.
Regards
Richard
